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how do you decide when "good enough" is "good enough" with a concept?

for example....we did counting coins for Kindergarden....and my daughter knows all the coins....and can count a group of nickels dimes and pennies......or a group of quarters...but if I throw them all together she frequently gets confused. I don't want to get caught up in her being "perfect" at everything (after all she is only 6) but how do you decide which skills need perfected and which ones they are doing ok for their age at? She is getting frustrated....we have been practising about 2-3 times a week on it for a few minutes...I do seem improvement.....just not sure how much to push....or if I should come back to it later. She is starting to act stressed when she sees me get the coins out....Any thoughts?

I would stop pushing it especially if she is noticeably stressing about it. My kids are older then her & they sometimes get the quarter & nickle confused when counting or separating money I just gently point out the differences they realize what they have done & correct it! Also they are counting the money because it is their money & they want to count it not because I dragged it out & want them to count it (although there have been times they have asked for my change jar to do just that all on their own).

Put the coins away for a while. Give her time to adjust. She is still very young and sometimes those darn coins are hard to remember for them. After about a month bring them out but make a game out of it. If you make it fun, the will learn.

I loosely follow our state's standard of content. I use it as our lowest base line. If the person kids are supposed to have it mastered by the end of the year, then I try to make sure we learn it too. If not, I put it away and let my kiddo mature a bit more.

When I was going over coins with my daughter, we were also going over who the people on the coins were in history coincidentally. To make it easier learning the which coins were which. (Mind you, this was supposed to be really sill and fun, not to be offensive, or necessarily historically accurate) George Washington is so important, he's not just on the dollar, but on our quarter too - the most commonly used so he gets seen a lot.Lincoln is on the Penny becouse he did hundreds of things while in office, and he abolished slavery which is why the coin is a different color - (the silver coins were getting a little prejudice)Thomas Jefferson is on the nickel because, if you just have a nickle, you're broke, but if you melt it down, it's worth a lot more (which is illegal to do with pennies and nickels), just like the man! He was broke, but his property and belongings were worth much more. Why is the nickle bigger than the dime? Because Jefferson was a founding father and would be sorely wounded if his face wasn't more well known than Roosevelts.Franklin D Roosevelt is on the dime because he started the March of Dimes.

Mostly learning the difference between Washington and Jefferson helped her remember which coin was which... The others were pretty easy for her to remember

i dont settle for just mediocre i think children should have to master a skill before moving on....however if it is becoming stressful or its just not clickig i would step away from it...do something else in math and then come back to it in a few weeks also if you can tell us how youve been teaching her we can help giv eyou some other ideas to try....are you jsut working on coin recognition or the value of those coins? are you have her count nickells as just counting the objects or count them like money as in 5 cents and so on? hav eyou jsut been practicing with real money? anything else youve done with the lesson? let me know all this and ill try to help :)

For grade K it can be much more relaxed. I'd be happy she can recognize & add like coins, and wait until next year to introduce adding mixed coins. Think of it like this: in grade k kids often learn the basics of single digit addition (1+1=2) but they don't work much with double digit addition until closer to 1st grade. It's the same w/money.

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